lunes, 19 de octubre de 2015

Liberty, the 12th release of OpenStack, came out last week

With 1,933 individual contributors and 164 organizations contributing to the release, Liberty offers finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies such as containers in production environments ...
 
Quoting from its web-site:
“OpenStack Liberty, the 12th release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, offers unparalleled new functionality and enhancements. With the broadest support for popular data center technologies, OpenStack has become the integration engine for service providers and enterprises deploying cloud services.
With 1,933 individual contributors and 164 organizations contributing to the release, Liberty offers finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies such as containers in production environments”
 
Here you can see a short video explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7r2-p8Mki4?autoplay=1



And the press release is quoted below:
 

Newest OpenStack® Release Expands Services for Software-Defined Networking, Container Management and Large Deployments

AUSTIN, Texas // October 15, 2015 — Cloud builders, operators and users unwrap a lengthy wish list of new features and refinements today with the Liberty release of OpenStack, the 12th version of the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. With the broadest support for popular data center technologies, OpenStack has become the integration engine for service providers and enterprises deploying cloud services.
 
Available for download today, OpenStack Liberty answers the requests of a diverse community of the software’s users, including finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies like containers in production environment.
 
Enhanced Manageability
Finer-grained access controls and simpler management features debut in Liberty. New capabilities like common library adoption and better configuration management have been added in direct response to the requests of OpenStack cloud operators. The new version also adds role-based access control (RBAC) for the Heat orchestration and Neutron networking projects. These controls allow operators to fine tune security settings at all levels of network and orchestration functions and APIs.
 
Simplified Scalability
As the size and scope of production OpenStack deployments continue to grow—both public and private—users have asked for improved support for large deployments. In Liberty, these users gain performance and stability improvements that include the initial version of Nova Cells v2, which provides an updated model to support very large and multi-location compute deployments. Additionally, Liberty users will see improvements in the scalability and performance of the Horizon dashboard, Neutron networking Cinder block storage services and during upgrades to Nova’s compute services.
 
Extensibility to Support New Technologies
OpenStack is a single, open source platform for management of the three major cloud compute technologies; virtual machines, containers and bare metal instances. The software also is a favorite platform for organizations implementing NFV (network functions virtualization) services in their networking topologies. Liberty advances the software’s capabilities in both areas with new features like an extensible Nova compute scheduler, a network Quality of Service (QoS) framework and enhanced LBaaS (load balancing as a service).
 
Liberty also brings the first full release of the Magnum containers management project. Out of the gate, Magnum supports popular container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. Magnum makes it easier to adopt container technology by tying into existing OpenStack services such as Nova, Ironic and Neutron. Further improvements are planned with new project, Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components such as libnetwork.
 
The Heat orchestration project adds dozens of new resources for management, automation and orchestration of the expanded capabilities in Liberty. Improvements in management and scale, including APIs to expose what resources and actions are available, all filtered by RBAC are included in the new release.
 
1,933 individuals across more than 164 organizations contributed to OpenStack Liberty through upstream code, reviews, documentation and internationalization efforts. The top code committers to the Liberty release were HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, VMware, and NEC.
 
Focus on Core Services with Optional Capabilities
During the Liberty release cycle, the community shifted the way it organizes and recognizes upstream projects, which became known by community members as the “big tent.” Ultimately, the change allows the community to focus on a smaller set of stable core services, while encouraging more innovation and choice in the broader upstream ecosystem.
The core services, available in every OpenStack-Powered product or public cloud, center around compute (virtualization and bare metal), storage (block and object) and networking.
New projects added in the last six months provide optional capabilities for container management (supporting Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm) with Magnum, network orchestration with Astara, container networking with Kuryr, billing with CloudKitty and a Community App Catalog populated with many popular application templates. These new services join already recognized projects to support big data analysis, database cluster management, orchestration and more.
 
Supporting Quotes
“Liberty is a milestone release because it underscores the ability of a global, diverse community to agree on technical decisions, amend project governance in response to maturing software and the voice of the marketplace, then build and ship software that gives users and operators what they need. All of this happens in an open community where anyone can participate, giving rise to an extensible platform built to embrace technologies that work today and those on the horizon.”
— Jonathan Bryce, executive director, OpenStack Foundation
 
“We use OpenStack because it delivers the core services we need in a production cloud platform that can extend to new technologies like containers. The ability to embrace emerging technologies as an open community rather than going solo is a primary reason why we’re sold on OpenStack.”
— Lachlan Evenson, cloud platform engineering, Lithium Technologies
 
“OpenStack has emerged as an increasingly capable and widely deployed open cloud technology. The companies using it successfully are those that have done their research, engaged with the project’s community and deployed in manageable stages. We expect OpenStack-based service providers will outgrow the overall IaaS service provider market through 2019.”
— Al Sadowski, research director, 451 Research
 
“Notable Fortune 100 enterprises like BMW, Disney, and Wal-Mart have irrefutably proven that OpenStack is viable for production environments. These are regular companies, not firms that were born digital like Etsy, Facebook, and Netflix. OpenStack’s presence in the market is now accelerating, leveraging the success of these pioneers.”
— Lauren Nelson, senior analyst, Forrester Research, as written in “OpenStack Is Ready — Are You?,” a May 2015 report from Forrester Research.

miércoles, 14 de octubre de 2015

jueves, 1 de octubre de 2015

New edition of COBIT 5 Foundation Course in Valencia



On Monday, October  the 5th, a new edition of COBIT 5 Foundation course will start.
  

A good opportunity, if you leave in Valencia or near, to learn from the foundation of COBIT 5 from Javier_Peris, awarded with Harold Weiss in 2015 by ISACA and one of the few certified trainers.
 

You're still on time to do it, don't hesitate, take the chance















 

sábado, 4 de julio de 2015

COBIT 5 course by Harold Weiss 2015 awarded Javier Peris


Yesterday I was very lucky, I had the great fortune of attending to the COBIT 5 course provided by the reputed expert on the subject, Javier Peris, one of the few world-wide certified trainer (COBIT® Individual Trainer acreditado en España por APMG ,plus COBIT® Certified Assessor, besides of much other certifications as ITIL Expert, CGEIT, CRISC, and so on) and recently awarded with the Harold Weiss 2015 prize (you cad find here an interview)

It was only the 1st day, so I’m really looking forward to remaining course days: today is the second one, so I’m going to get my dose soon ;-)
 

 

miércoles, 3 de diciembre de 2014

Is the Operating System part of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in cloud computing?

I’ve recently debated about if Operating System (in a real Cloud Environment) is part, or not, of the IaaS, and therefore, if its control (management, monitoring and so on) is customer’s responsibility or provider’s.
 
On the one hand, according to the NIST definition of Cloud Computing (the most widely accepted, “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing“, “Special Publication 800-145“) and quoting from it: “IaaS: “The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, network and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to able to deploy and run arbitrary software, wick can include operating system and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, bur has control over operating systems and deployed applications …”. So, puristically speaking, the Operating System is not part of IaaS, as it’s showed in the next picture emphasizing the control scope of the consumer and provider in an IaaS service:
 
IaaS-control scope of the consumer and provider

  
On the other hand, in the practice some Cloud Providers, in their IaaS provision dashboards let you chose the operating system (“image”) to deploy in the Virtual Machine (VM) you provision. So they are responsible of guaranteeing the Operating System “image” is good; so in some way they have a partial responsibility on the Operating System level (crossing the border of the IaaS) but it’s only in the first deployment of the operating system in the VM; after then the customer gets the control of the operating System so he’s full responsible of it and software built up or installed on. This other picture shows this fuzzy border for the initial step in the VM provisioning responsibilities:
 
IaaS-fuzzy border for the initial step in the VM provisioning responsibilities
 
Note, of course, other (most) IaaS cloud providers let you to upload you own Operating System images, so they are responsible for providing you the VM on the hypervisor  (or container) chosen by them, but nothing else, matching the purist definition of IaaS. Note: this is the case of Tissat, we offer wide catalogue of operating system images but our Cloud Platform (called Nefeles, and based on OpenStack) let customer to upload its own images too.
 
Besides the first picture, the next one shows the PaaS and SaaS scope control of consumer and provider according to NIST definition:
 
PaaS & SaaS-control scope of the consumer and provider
 
 
Finally, the border between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, can be summarized in the following picture:
 
IaaS, PaaS & SaaS-control scope of the consumer and provider-1
 
 
Or in a simplified way in this one:
 
IaaS, PaaS & SaaS-control scope of the consumer and provider-2

martes, 18 de noviembre de 2014

CloudSpaces project gets the OCEAN’s Quality Open Cloud label

CloudSpaces logo
 
I’m proud to announce the R&D Project CloudSpaces, partially funded by FP7 Programme of the European Union, has obtained the Quality Check of the OCEAN  project.
 
OCEAN Quality Check logo
   
As they say, only 20 over 74 open cloud projects in the OCD received an OCEAN Open Cloud label:
-  7 Open Cloud projects obtained the Quality Checked by OCEAN label 2014.
- 13 Open Cloud projects obtained the Reviewed by OCEAN label 2014.
 
The CloudSpaces project is been developed by a consortium integrated by 3 Universities: “Rovira i Virgili”, Eurecom (France), and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), and 3 Companies: EyeOs, NEC and, of course, TISSAT.
 
Besides, it should be remembered that CloudSpaces is the project where it’s been developed StackSync (a personal cloud software) that recently wined 3 “Software Libre 2014” open software awards (see my last post in 2014-nov-07).
 
Please let me partially quote its e-mail with more data about the OCEAN’s Open Cloud Quality label.
 
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Dear Open Cloud Supporter,

I’m glad to inform you that your Cloud Project has been evaluated by the OCEAN project team (www.ocean-project.eu) and received the Quality Checked by OCEAN label.Quality_Checked_RGB_132x124
 
The OCEAN Open Cloud labels recognize innovative assets, new concepts, architecture documentation and/or re-usable open source cloud components described in the Open Cloud Directory (OCD).
 
The Open Cloud Directory 2014 brochure contains a short description of your project. Included links and QR codes give access to project details such as technologies, licenses, classification, and quality reports about submitted open source codes.
 
Your OCEAN Open Cloud label offers several dissemination opportunities:
1- Your project is listed in the Open Cloud Directory Brochure – to be distributed at OpenStack Summit Paris and upcoming cloud events.
2- You can use the attached OCEAN Open Cloud label and place it on your website and documentation with a direct link to the Open Cloud Directory : http://www.ocdirectory.org/
3- Do not hesitate to mention your OCEAN Open Cloud label on social networks, in your dissemination deliverables and Press Releases.
 
Only 20 over 74 open cloud projects in the OCD received an OCEAN Open Cloud label:
-  7 Open Cloud projects obtained the Quality Checked by OCEAN label 2014
- 13 Open Cloud projects obtained the Reviewed by OCEAN label 2014

On behalf of the entire OCEAN project team, congratulations to your consortium!

viernes, 7 de noviembre de 2014

StackSync has wined 3 “Software Libre 2014” awards


StackSync LogoCloudSpaces logo
    








I’m proud to announce that StackSync (http://stacksync.org/), an open-source scalable software (for personal clouds built on OpenStack) developed jointly by the “Rovira i Virgili” University (Tarragona, Spain) and the company Tissat, inside the CloudSpaces Project that is partially funded by European Commission (under the FP7 R&D Programme), has got 3 “Software Libre” (free software) awards in the 2014 call (its 6th edition). The “Software Libre” is an initiative of “PortalProgramas”.
StackSync has wined in the 3 categories it has competed:
- ESENCIAL PARA EMPRESAS (essential for companies)
- ESENCIAL PARA LA TECNOLOGÍA (essential for technology)
- MAYOR POTENCIAL DE CRECIMIENTO (bigger potential growing)
It that categories it competes against other famous software as, LibreOffice, Ubuntu, NetBeans, Gecos, QVD, and so on
More details here or clicking in the “GANADOR” word in the red label of the next award logos:
Ganador como Esencial para empresas en los Premios PortalProgramas al mejor software libre 2014
Ganador como Esencial para la tecnología en los Premios PortalProgramas al mejor software libre 2014
Ganador como Mayor potencial de crecimiento en los Premios PortalProgramas al mejor software libre 2014